Federal agents found more than two dozen minors illegally working inside a poultry plant in Kidron, Ohio, earlier this month, according to local immigration advocates who spoke to NBC News on the condition of anonymity.
The children, mainly from Guatemala, according to the advocates, were working in meat processing and sanitation in a plant run by Gerber’s Poultry, which produces Amish Farm Chicken, advertised with the slogan “Better feed, better taste.”
Now we have child labor and unsafe working conditions in meat packing plants.
This is truly the second Gilded Age.
I have to disagree partly to your overgeneralization of our current times; I still think there is some kind of economic growth but it is not to the people and more concentrated to a few individuals and companies. After the gilded age there was a Progressive Era where people sought to end corruption, monopoly, waste, and inefficiency. Which is what may be beginning right now, but technology is different and most people are not as active in this effort from all the distractions these devices and social websites offer. On top of that, during the Gilded Age, there was a time of rapid economic growth. Back then the American wages grew much higher than those in Europe. There was especially significant growth of wages for skilled workers, and industrialization demanded an ever-increasing unskilled labor force. While in this current period, skilled workers are seeing stagnant wages that do not match the inflationary economy that demands more than 100k a year salary to barely afford a house. Also, there is displacing of unskilled workers to outside country by a form of outsourcing that the internet and advances in computational power brings. There is not the same restrictions in labor and there is a stricter automated process run by computers that contrast the Gilded Period heavily.
for anyone who don’t know the Gilded Age is “a term coined by Mark Twain and used by some historians to refer roughly to the period between 1877 and 1900.” [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
The sequel is always a bit different than the original, right?
The original Gilded Age is also created due to advancements in technologies as a culmination of the Second Industrial Revolution: new methods of transportation from railroad and airplanes, as well as in communication from the invention of the telephone, which of course, would be the device of “distraction” as you described during its time.
Do you not think that the Bezos and Musks are as the Rockerfellers and Vanderbilts, the robber barons of our age?
Of course, the issue I care about in particular: the labor strikes and fight for equality was never as great now as it was since the Gilded Age. The similarity here is eerie.
Please don’t call manual laboring workers “unskilled” and disrespect their work: everyone has their role to play in the world, and if you sit in front of a computer all day for your job, then I doubt you would have the skills to do construction work.
I am not going to dive into the semantics of what a Gilded Age is. As far as we know there is a loss of world wide knowledge from the rampant misinformation. Something that does not have a real solution and can be mitigated at times.
oh not necessary to slam words into my mouth. The real unskilled labor are those that requires relatively little or no training or experience. Even then there are people out there who are not as highly trained as a true professional who are bluffing their skill level. There is plenty of memes about managers or executives being stupid jerks. It is not really hard to find someone who was hired because they were cheap to hire, hence the outsourcing and passing the risk to someone else.